In the Beginning was a New Idea

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My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we like to light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish
text or tradition.

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Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast
platform and now on YouTube and Substack.

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We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes.

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This week is a little different.

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On Simchat Torah, we will hear the very last parsha of the Torah, V’zot HaBracha, and then
almost without taking a breath.

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We will take out another Torah and begin Bereshit.

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We will hear the Torah’s final words, Asher asah Moshe, l’einei kol Yisrael, which Moses did
to the eyes or before the eyes of all Israel, and then immediately go to Bereshit Bara

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Elohim, when God began to create.

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I want to suggest that we don’t put a period after Yisrael.

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Let’s just keep reading.

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Because maybe there is something that Moses did to the eyes of Israel, something that
changed the way Israel saw the world, that made it possible for Israel to hear those next

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words, Bereshit bara Elohim, in an entirely new way.

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The Gospel of John famously begins: In the beginning was the IDEA.

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I want to suggest in the beginning was a new idea.

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So, Adam, that’s what I want to talk about today.

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What was the new idea?

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What was so radical about the way Genesis imagined God?

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And what does that new idea ultimately tell us about ourselves?

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We’re gonna spend the whole day on one pasuk.

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That’s amazing.

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And it’s a great yeah, we would call it a yeshiva, a great khap to connect the end of the
Torah to the beginning of the Torah.

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Well, you will hear that I found that there was a whole genre of interpretations,
including the Sefat Emet who builds mountains and hills on that.

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But what I’m gonna don’t tell them Torah Vodaath.

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But you’re becoming a chassid.

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But before I give that away, what I’m really saying is that the Torah that we read was
meant to be read and it was meant to be heard.

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And it was heard by people who knew what was coming and had read all the way till the end
of Devarim and were reading over again.

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So it’s not quite as cute as it sounds, because what we’re going to say is how
revolutionary this was, but to the people who heard it,

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It didn’t sound revolutionary at all.

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It was what they expected.

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And that is as radical as it gets.

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So here we go, Genesis 1:1.

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“When God began to create the heaven and earth”, in contrast to other people who say “In the
beginning God created”, which is how you and I grew up.

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But that is the way the moderns, whether it’s Robert Alter or the JPS Tanakh,
translate it.

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And fascinating, that’s the way Rashi and the Ibn Ezra go.

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So Rashi says.

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In the beginning God created.

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Wherever the word Reishit occurs in scripture, it is in the construct state, meaning in
the beginning of the reign of Yehoyakim.

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So the Bereshit comes before the reign, the beginning of his kingdom, Reishit Mamlachto,
the first fruits of the corn, Reishit degancha.

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So he says this is the beginning of creation.

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We’re not even talking about matter.

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We’re not even talking about the creation of the world.

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It’s all starting in mid sentence.

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Similarly, here you must translate Bereshit bara, Elohim, as though it is read
Bereshit bero at the beginning of God’s creating.

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So I’m even adding to the fact that not only is the writer assuming that the
listener knows that God is there already and God has no history.

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But they also kind of know that the world… it’s not about cosmology.

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It’s not about creating matter.

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The Ibn Ezra says as follows.

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Others say that the bet of Bereshit is a preposition.

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They explain that scripture intends to preclude the thought that heaven and earth were
preexisting.

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Hence it states, in the beginning, I believe that Bereshit is in the construct in the
beginning of the reign of Jehoukam.

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So what

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Ibn Ezra does is says this is not just wordplay.

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There’s actually a philosophical nuance here.

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That if you say Bereshit bara in the beginning God created, you really are, in a sense,
telling the story of the creation of matter and that before God created, there was

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nothing.

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In Latin, that means creatio ex nihilo, there was nothing there.

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In Hebrew, it’s yesh me’ayin, something from nothing.

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But if you take this interpretation,

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You don’t have to go for that.

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In the beginning of his creation, he took the sun, he took the moon, he took pre-existing
matter.

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So it really is fascinating if you just read this in a very kind of normal way.

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What it

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presupposes and what is not there.

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So I’m going to read a little bit of Nahum Sarna because we are reading the Torah for
the first time.

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And he has Understanding Genesis.

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And we’re also going to do a little Cassuto today because we’re really setting the stage,
okay.

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Cassuto is great on Bereshit.

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We are setting the stage for all that follows.

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So why not reach out to the giants on whose shoulders we stand at?

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So Sarna says as follows: To be sure any work

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of hoary antiquity is bound to prove difficult reading.

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Problems of text and language are unavoidable.

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The modes of literary expression will be strange to your ears.

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The historic allusions to events of local, national, international importance that lie
behind the text, [requires] scholarly commentary to make intelligible.

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We’ve heard that before.

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We have to know the context in the ancient Near East.

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Even to the religiously oriented, some of the religious concepts and values

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Will hardly be palatable today.

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Of course, that’s where Madlik gets its juice from, when we find out what, how they thought
differently.

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So he says this situation actually didn’t come only in contemporary modern minds.

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It existed as soon as the ancient Near Eastern world succumbed to the flood tides of
Hellenism.

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A Hellenist would open up a book on creation and they would want to know cosmology, they
would want to know the history of the cosmos.

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They would want to know ontology.

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When did matter existence begin?

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The old culture from which the Hebrew Bible had issued disintegrated and became radically
transformed.

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We forgot what the context was of the original people that listened to.

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Very good, yeah.

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So he says, and this is what we’re going to argue: that if you can, as best you can, put
yourself into the shoes

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Of someone pre-Hellenism, someone before we started looking at these texts differently.

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The Hebrew cosmology represents a revolutionary break with the contemporary world in which
it lived, a parting of the spiritual ways that involve the undermining of the entire

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prevailing mythological worldview.

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So now he’s talking about the [Ancient] Near East, where you have stories of

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Gods fighting with each other, gods giving birth to each other, gods taking domains, one
took the sea, one took the earth.

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Nowhere else in the contemporary world did it become the regnant idea, obsessive and
historically significant.

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Israel’s monotheism constituted a new creation, a revolution in in religion, a sudden
transformation.

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Because of the things it doesn’t say.

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The extraordinary consciousness of difference which characterized ancient Israel was
superimposed itself upon the awareness of a common background.

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Israel actually saw itself developed and its fate was unique.

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If you read this, you start to look at Israel as the chosen people slightly differently.

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When I the Israelites in Exodus 33 say that we are distinguished from every people on
the face of the earth.

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Or in Leviticus, we are set apart from other peoples, they’re just saying a fact.

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They’re saying our worldview is totally different.

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There is not someone in the Ancient Near East who could read our text and even understand
what we’re talking about.

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So here’s what was different.

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The outstanding peculiarity of the biblical account is the complete absence of mythology
in the classic pagan sense of the term.

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The religion of Israel is essentially non-mythological, there being no suggestion of any
theobiography, any biography of God doesn’t exist.

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And that’s what everybody would have been.

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Another great phrase, theobiography.

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You know, there’s a phrase in the yeshiva that says, I came to see a movie about creation,
and it nothing was there.

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Ha’ikar chaser min hasefer {the main subject matter is missing from the book].

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This is a story of creation.

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It doesn’t talk about creation the way the ancient Near East would have talked about it.

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Scripture themselves do not openly betray a true understanding of a mythological paganism.

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In fact, as a result of their thoroughgoing monotheism, the picture they paint of the
religion of the contemporaries of Israel is really a distortion.

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So, Rabbi, we can’t help but look at this not only from the idea of the text and
what the text is saying, but from the idea of the listeners.

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And it was so clear that the listeners were so comfortable with what they were reading and
seeing that they didn’t understand what a pagan who would have walked in who would have

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said, it’s missing.

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The whole story is missing.

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We are absolutely working in parallel universes here.

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And that’s what becomes so absolutely different and radical about this text.

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That’s fantastic.

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This is really a good, this is kind of a summary of everything included in this whole
discussion.

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Yeah.

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And again, because we’ve spent so many times doing this, we can actually understand it.

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So for instance, and this is all based, even though I’m using the words of Nahum Sarna,
it’s based on the words of Yehezkel Kaufmann.

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And what he said, that if you read the rest of the Bible, not only creation.

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But if you read the rest of the Bible, the picture they paint of the religion of the
contemporaries of Israel is a distortion.

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It’s a caricature, rabbi.

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It’s almost a comic book.

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How many times do you have to say, How can you bow down to a statue that you made that
morning?

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I get it already.

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But that was as far as it got.

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It was fetishism.

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They didn’t understand the the whole world view of paganism.

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So remote are the biblical writers from the religious atmosphere of the pagan world that
they are unable to present a true picture of it.

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So, we’re looking at both sides.

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We’re looking at something radical as it is, as it’s written, something radical that the
listener felt very comfortable with hearing.

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And therefore, we can make this argument that this is truly a paradigm shift.

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it’s a paradigm, it’s a shift in the grammar that is used.

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The notion of the birth of God, no biography of God.

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It doesn’t even begin with a statement about the existence of God.

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That of course talks to us as moderns.

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You know, we would start by saying if you’re writing a theology, say, and God exists.

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So, it really is fascinating what’s not in this story.

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You know, the Torah does not begin by saying, in the beginning was God.

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It doesn’t talk about God’s existence.

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It says God created.

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And almost even with the creation, you can say that it doesn’t even talk about the
creation of matter.

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It’s in the grammar of the words that we’re looking at.

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So, what I’d like to do is look at Cassuto, who says something very similar, but I
think he adds even some more nuance to it.

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So he talks about.

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the rest of the Ancient Near East.

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And he says they began as a rule with a theogony.

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We’ve heard of the word progeny and it’s the history of God.

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That is with the origin of the gods, the genealogy of the deities who preceded the birth
of the world and mankind.

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And they told of the antagonism between this god and that god of frictions that arose from
those classes of will and of mighty wars that were waged by the gods.

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They connected the genesis of the world with the genesis of the gods.

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You couldn’t separate them.

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There were hostilities.

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And of course, all of these great biblical scholars say if you read the texts, which we’re
not going to get into today, when it says tohu va-vohu, yes, maybe it echoes Tiamat and

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other gods that were there.

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It makes reference to it, but what it leaves out is just absolutely amazing.

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And then it

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Goes on.

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He says, Then came the Torah and soared aloft as on eagles’ wings above all of these
notions.

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in the source sheet, you can see Cassuto saying that in Hebrew.

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He’s clearly taking a word out of creation of God hovering over the planet as saying that
the Torah’s account of creation hovered over everything.

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Are not many gods but one God, not theogony, a history of God, for a God has no family
tree, no wars, nor strife, nor the class of wills, but only one will, which rules over

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everything without the slightest let or hindrance.

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Not a deity associated with nature and identified with it wholly or in part, but a god who
stands absolutely above nature outside of it.

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And nature and all of its constituent elements, even the sun and all the other entities,
be

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They never so exalted are only his creatures.

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So this is a highfalutin biblical scholar saying this.

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But what I want to argue is that in those words and in that context, even the simplest
Israelite listening to it would have known what is missing.

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And he would have known starkly what is being shown here, a God who is in charge of the
world and manifesting it and manipulating it.

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It’s profound.

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That’s that that is really profound.

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So it’s you have to appreciate the background to understand how the Jew is reading this
story.

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That’s really what both Sarna and Cassuto are getting to.

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And now back to our podcast.

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And you know, one of the things that I was thinking about, and in Sarna’s introduction,
he kind of gets into this.

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Here we have this crazy tiny little country that never had a major empire between the
superpowers of Babylonia and Egypt.

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In the promised land, we have found artifacts and things from Babylonia and from
Egypt.

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But you will never find a piece of the Torah in Egypt or in Babylonia.

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It wasn’t read.

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It was ignored.

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It was not heard of.

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It was so different than what.

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The reader would have expected that it had no readership.

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That struck me again this year, that this was so different.

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But I want to get back a little bit to the fact that my main point here is about the
reader and the listener.

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That the reader and the listener found this so completely obvious.

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And I can’t stress enough Yehezkel Kaufmann’s point of view, which is that we really
do have.

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A book that is so isolated, so talking in a different grammar and a different context
than everything around it, that one didn’t understand the other.

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The way that the Torah portrays polytheism and paganism is childish.

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And the way it describes creation is diametrically different, on a different plane than
anyone would have expected.

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And it’s not.

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here, but it’s very loudly here.

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And I want to focus a little bit on the fact, I said this in the intro, that this was a
text that was meant to be read.

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And so in in prior episodes, at one point, we were reading the story of Jacob stealing
the blessing and how he was doing all these bad things.

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And then finally he succeeded.

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And we talked about how is it possible or why would a sacred script have all these
things inside of it?

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And one of the things we said, and the example I gave was Megillat Esther and Purim, is
the people that heard these stories had heard them before.

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They had heard them multiple of times.

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They knew when to cheer when Mordechai was mentioned and boo when Haman was mentioned.

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They knew that Jacob went through a tough stretch and had to cut a few corners in the
beginning.

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That’s what you really have to understand as we begin this journey all over again this
year, when we read this, and we’re doing it for the first verse.

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That we’re trying to get into the head of the listener who listened to this and knew what
he was hearing and knew what he expected and knew what wasn’t there.

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Robert Alter talks about something called Type Scenes.

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He says, What I’m suggesting.

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Is that the contemporary audience of these tales, being perfectly familiar with the
convention, took particular pleasure in seeing how in each instance the convention could

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be through the narrator’s art both faithfully followed and renewed for the specific needs
of the hero under consideration, or in this case, the subject matter.

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In some cases, moreover, the biblical authors counted on their audience’s familiarity with
the features and function of the type scene.

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Could merely allude to the type scene or present a transfigured version of it.

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And that’s why when you read the modern scholars and they start to draw parallels to the
Babylonian mythology, it’s just a little hint here and there.

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Go on, Adam.

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Right.

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00:19:40,787 –> 00:19:42,745
Well, I want to say that’s brilliant.

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You were talking before about being a sophisticated audience.

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You know, what Alter is saying is that the Torah is written for a sophisticated audience,
for an audience that knows Torah.

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And therefore you could refer.

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Refer to something and people should understand it.

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So when Laban says to Jacob, here we don’t give the younger before the older, it doesn’t
tell you what it refers to.

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But you need to be sophisticated enough to know but you younger, you took you took over
for the older.

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And it’s a criticism, it’s a veiled criticism.

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So that’s a brilliant point by Alter.

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And it makes us read the text differently.

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Because we’re reading, even reading a play is always gonna be different than
reading prose.

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but this is a live audible text that was read over and over again to an audience,
which of course brings us to Simchat Torah and brings us to the unique way that we are

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going to be hearing V’zot HaBracha, which doesn’t get its own Shabbat.

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It is only read in conjunction.

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a breath away from starting the Torah all over again.

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So we know that is the minhag, the custom that we have now.

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That’s why we call the last day Simchat Torah.

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We have a Chatan Torah, we have a Chatan Bereshit, and we have a Chatan Devarim.

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And they’re married together.

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There is this continuation.

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And as I said in the beginning, it kind of struck me.

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I said to myself,

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Was there anyone who therefore, because the law says that you have to go directly from
this is V’zot HaBracha to Bereshit, who tried to connect them the way you and I, rabbi, would do

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between connecting Bereshit to Noach or connecting Noach to Lech L’cha

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And so sure enough, if you read the text, it has potential.

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The last pasuk in the Torah says, and we quoted it before, for all the great might and
awesome power that Moses displayed before all Israel.

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So it says…

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You can read Asher asah Moshe l’einei kol Yisrael as what Moses did to the eyes of all Israel.

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And then you read this parsha.

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So now I’m saying to myself, is there a classical commentary who actually misread or read
the way I did?

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Which is Moses says, You’ve read the whole book now.

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You’ve read the whole Five Books, your eyes have changed.

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You see the world differently, you have a different Weltanschauung.

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Now let’s start reading Bereshit all over again.

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It’s gonna be different this time.

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So sure enough, I did find in the Sefat Emet.

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And the Sefat Emet says every individual Israelite has a unique mode of perception through
which he is able to see and apprehend something particular in the world that no one else

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can see, and to them was given an opening of the eye.

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So in the Hebrew, he says,

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He combines l’einei kol Yisrael, Bereshit bara.

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He does exactly what I’m suggesting we should do.

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And he says it’s pekichat ayin.

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It opens up the eye.

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So, in a way, and he does a whole lot of other things, he does recognize that we see our
texts differently, we see the world differently, we are a people that have gone

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through.

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This paradigm shift.

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Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh actually wrote, Moshe tiken et bechinat ha-re’iyah.

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Moshe actually fixed the ability, the faculty of sight, as in which Moses did to
the eyes of all Israel.

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so I have company here that at least there is another scholar that said this
connection.

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And so what I’m arguing today, rabbi, is the unique.

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condition that we have on Simchat Torah of reading the end of the Torah with the
beginning, on a much higher scale without going to pesukim is demonstrating something.

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It’s demonstrating that if you read this whole book and then reread this whole book and
reread it again, and if you heard it from your father and from your grandfather and you

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told it over to your children, you are creating a universe of grammar that’s going to
enable you

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To hear it read differently.

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Maybe sometimes it’ll preclude you from understanding some other cultures.

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But this is a different grammer.

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But that’s okay also.

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That’s that’s true.

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It is okay.

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But if you go down from 60,000 feet, you can make a drash and say that Moshe really ends
the Torah by saying, I’ve changed the way you see, and starts by saying Bereshit bara,

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uh-huh.

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Did you see what I didn’t say there?

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You see what was missing?

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It’s I think it’s a nice, it’s a nice way to think and remind ourselves how important
this reading of the Torah is, because that is actually what we’re celebrating on Simchat

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Torah anyway.

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As much as celebrating the Torah, we’re celebrating the cycle of reading the Torah and
hearing the Torah.

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And um I just wanted to pause for a second.

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To focus on the Simchat Torah aspect of this and this concept of reading this cycle and
reinforcing ideas that we have and then re laying them over the texts every year newly.

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So I just want to say, of course, this is fantastic.

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The tradition to finish the Torah on Simchat Torah and begin it the same day is a very old
tradition.

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That might go back, you know, 1500 years.

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00:25:31,823 –> 00:25:35,524
So it’s not something they invented in Poland a hundred years ago.

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This is kind of part and parcel of the experience of reading the Torah is to go
front to back, which is basically what we’re starting to do next week, which is to go from

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Bereshit bara to the end, but also back to front.

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Now you know that when we finish the Talmud, we go on.

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But what you know we go like dafyomi.

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You finish one tractate, you go on to the next one.

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But when you finished one tractate, the prayer that you say is Hadran alach.

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The word Hadran means we should repeat it.

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So we don’t actually do it, but at least we say it.

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00:26:17,356 –> 00:26:21,379
You finish learning Bava Kamma, you spend months learning Bava Kamma.

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And the first thing you say is, I want to do it all over again.

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00:26:25,258 –> 00:26:33,865
So even so it’s so interesting, Geoffrey, that your point about finishing and going back
and forwards and backwards and backwards and forwards is actually something that has it’s

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so much part of our tradition that it’s it’s even made its way into the oral tradition,
into the Talmud.

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Fantastic.

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I love that.

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So if it’s not talking about cosmology, and if it’s not talking about ontology and the
history of God, what are we supposed to take?

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And I went back to something that I think anyway is something that every kid hears when
they start the Bereshit.

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It’s a piece of Talmud, a piece of Midrash that says, why was the Torah started with
the letter bet and not the letter Aleph, I assume?

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So Rabbi Yonah said in the name of Rabbi Levi, why was the world created with the letter
bet?

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It is because just as the bet is closed on all three of its sides, but open in its front,
so you do not have permission to ask.

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what is below, what is above, what was before, and what is after, but only from the day
when the world created and onward.

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00:27:29,574 –> 00:27:42,902
So I have to say before we get into it, when it says what was before and what is after,
what it means is prehistory and after history, the eschatology, the end of days.

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What it is permissible to discuss is how we live a better life, how we make our pathway,
how we follow the path of Torah.

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and I think if you wanted to get a very crude message of the Torah is not about
cosmology, it would be here.

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It’s not about what came before us.

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00:28:03,569 –> 00:28:04,910
It’s not about the heavens.

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You want to study astronomy, go somewhere else.

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00:28:07,673 –> 00:28:14,980
You wanna try to parallel the texts of the six days of creation to the Big Bang Theory,
you’re wasting your time.

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It’s not what the book is about.

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And I love that.

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00:28:17,900 –> 00:28:28,253
The other thing that it says, it goes on, Rabbi Acha bar Chanina said in the name of Rabbi Acha, for
twenty-six generations the Aleph complained before the throne of the Holy One, blessed be.

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It said to him, Master of the universe, I am the first of the letters, but you did not
create your world with me.

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00:28:34,155 –> 00:28:36,535
The Holy One, blessed be, he said to it.

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00:28:36,535 –> 00:28:41,957
And he ends by saying, The Ten Commandments begin with an Aleph, Anochi.

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00:28:41,957 –> 00:28:46,530
So again, I think, .. I’m taking a little poetic license.

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00:28:46,530 –> 00:28:50,712
But what I’m saying is what preceded the bet was the Aleph.

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00:28:50,712 –> 00:28:56,496
And what preceded the Aleph meant was the assumptions that the
reader has.

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That we already assumed that God was never created.

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He was not birthed, that matter was.

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00:29:02,379 –> 00:29:10,570
So in a sense, what it’s saying is we begin with a bet because the Aleph is the
assumptions, the unwritten assumptions that we learnt as we go through the Torah.

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It’s just start in the middle.

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00:29:12,224 –> 00:29:14,885
It’s all about starting in the middle.

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00:29:15,350 –> 00:29:22,514
And then, as we have in the past, you start to look at that what is the really the crux of
the story.

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00:29:22,514 –> 00:29:26,226
So the crux of the story is God creates through speaking.

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Vayomer, God speaks.

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00:29:29,188 –> 00:29:30,469
Vayavdel.

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00:29:30,469 –> 00:29:35,531
I think two years ago the name of our subject matter for the podcast was Splitting the
Adam.

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Because we went into all the times that God divides.

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00:29:39,924 –> 00:29:43,702
Dividing is another way of understanding.

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00:29:43,702 –> 00:29:48,124
Vayavdel is to distinguish between two things.

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00:29:48,174 –> 00:29:52,366
then it goes on and it has words like Vayikra.

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00:29:52,366 –> 00:29:55,187
He gave names, he tried to theorize.

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These are all things that the text is giving us permission or an obligation to do.

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00:30:01,170 –> 00:30:08,753
And finally, Vayar Elohim ki tov to evaluate, to give value and to give and to
evaluate things.

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So once you get beyond bara.

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All of the verbs that are used are verbs that we are encouraged to use ourselves as we
come into a world that we’ve been given, that pre-exists, and we have to learn how to

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discern and distinguish between light and dark, between hard and soft, between rich and
poor.

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00:30:29,040 –> 00:30:33,363
We have to learn to call things as they are, to give value judgments.

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00:30:33,363 –> 00:30:36,948
We need to give our own names and structure things.

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00:30:36,948 –> 00:30:39,779
It to me it changes the whole Genesis story.

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00:30:39,779 –> 00:30:46,981
But again, you can only do that and understand that and value that when you see what we’ve
left behind and what it’s fantastic.

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00:30:46,981 –> 00:30:48,161
That’s really good.

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00:30:48,161 –> 00:30:49,241
Really, really good.

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00:30:49,241 –> 00:30:54,423
A good way to end the Torah and to begin the Torah, which is really the challenge for this
week.

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00:30:54,423 –> 00:30:55,303
Fantastic.

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00:30:55,303 –> 00:30:59,184
So let’s wish our all of ourselves a Simchat Torah.

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And we’re looking forward to an amazing year in Madlik.

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Unbelievable.

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00:31:03,835 –> 00:31:05,626
See you all next week.

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00:31:05,626 –> 00:31:06,686
Be well.

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00:31:07,462 –> 00:31:08,733
Mm-hmm.